As you may have noticed by the weird fluctuations in link colors and other details today, we’ve been tinkering under the hood of our website. Hundreds and hundreds of lines of Pascal, APL and Logo are being tweaked and modified to improve every ounce of performance we can squeeze from our server farm of over 183 Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computers arrayed in a Token-Ring network. New features like Night Panel have been added, as well as one that you may have seen, but aren’t yet familiar with: the Glovebox.
Yes, the Glovebox! What the hell can that possibly mean in the context of a website? Great question. A question a child might ask, even, but not a childish question.
I suppose it may be useful to think of the Glovebox feature in terms of an actual car glovebox, or glove compartment, or hand-pants-cubby, or whatever you call it. The glovebox, as you may have guessed, did literally start as a place to stash your driving gloves in your car, so they’d be right there when you needed them.
Remember, back in the early days of motoring, there was a lot more specialized equipment and protective wear. Cars tended to be open, so you’d have to clad yourself in weather-tolerant gear, like big hats and thick, long overcoats, and, yes, rugged but comfortable driving gloves, usually made of leather or similar materials, like calfskin or bat hides. Early cars had runningboard-mounted toolboxes and trunks where your driving gear could be stashed, but those weren’t terribly convenient. Some cubby on the inside where smaller protective gear, like gloves, could be stashed would be ideal. Hence, the glove compartment was born.
Early 1900s Packards or Pierce-Arrows are usually credited with having the first dashboard-integrated gloveboxes, and the actual term “glove compartment” seems to have been coined by Dorthy Levitt, in her book The Woman and the Car in 1919.
Here’s what an early glovebox looked like on a 1915 Pierce-Arrow Model 48-B-3:
I think that’s pretty familiar to all of us still today, even if a side-hinged glovebox is something of a rarity in the modern era.
Of course, today, our gloveboxes tend to be filled with almost anything but gloves, mostly documents and papers and some fuses and bulbs and expired things of all varieties (snacks, medications, condoms, court summons) and I suppose our virtual glovebox is closer to that. You see, in the context of the Autopian site, the Glovebox is a place for you to store your favorite posts, or posts that you want to be able to refer to and find easily.
The Glovebox screen looks like this:
There’s the banner up top, with the glovebox from my own 1973 Volkswagen Beetle making a cameo, crammed full of stuff, and then below it are articles you’ve chosen to store in there. These are, of course, unique for every user, and you can have – as far as I know? – as many posts in there as you’d like.
You can use this for all-time favorites or just stick in the stories you mean to get back to each week, and empty it out regularly. It’s up to you.
To add a story to the Glovebox, just click the Add To Glovebox button seen at the top or bottom of the post, and to see the Glovebox itself, just click where it says “glovebox” on the top menu bar:
Now, this is just the first pass at the Glovebox; I’m already thinking about ways we can make this a place where you can store all kinds of car-related stuff you need, in one easy-to-access place from your computer, phone, VR headset, game console, whatever. Maybe we can figure out ways you can, say, keep your car to-do lists here, or have easy access to car part or tool buying through here, or your fleet list and status, or whatever sorts of notes you may want.
I’m open to listening to you, and hearing what you may like from your Glovebox! We’re just getting started, and I can’t exactly say what’s possible and what isn’t just yet, but I don’t think there’s any harm in throwing out some ideas! Maybe Advanced Gloveboxery will be a member perk?
Point is, I’m open to listen. Why not give the Glovebox a try and see what you think?
Seriously, you’re using APL? That was my second programming language after BASIC. Time flies…
can the feature be added off the homepage? so we dont have to click into the article first
Can we spend some time to get the website to actually load/work consistently and in a timely fashion? That’s been an issue since day one and seemingly has never been addressed (other than at least one feeble and failed attempt that I recall).
Just launch mackhardigraw.com and get it over with. Thanks
This is great, and also sounds like a great way for me to avoid having like 753 Autopian tabs open on my browser while I try to get to it all. I am one of those people.
That’s awesome. Can you fix the ads? I get that you gotta have ad revenue, but it covers most of the screen and the “x” is to close it. And the “x” doesn’t work the first time, it opens the ad. That’s shady as hell. Am I being petty? Yes. Yes I am. But it’s why I don’t visit as often as I’d like.
Members don’t see ads. Non-members see ads. Simple as that.
Have you guys considered making articles available for archival or download via the glovebox? Basic formatting with media in between, “reader-view” esque. Maybe members-only so you don’t lose ad revenue on that feature.
Back when you guys worked for that Orange German Lighting Website (green now??) I had a habit of downloading articles I liked. I know Raphael Orlove isn’t writing with you guys but that old article about the Volvo Amazon is still heartwarming all this time later.
Every Mack Hardigraw story is going into my glovebox.
I’d love to be able to put photos of the fleet (and past cars) in the glovebox!
I opened the glovebox and it was empty. I was hoping to find the user’s manual for this website in there. I also went to my account and can’t find a way to stash my registration in the glovebox. So this is nothing like my actual glovebox.
But I guess I’ll try saving some articles and using it as intended. Thanks for adding features and functions.
Side note: I was shocked that all the links in this article were informative. I was expecting at least a couple of them to be jokes. Like the Pascal link just giving a pic of Pedro Pascal or something. Jason, are you feeling okay?
Can this be set up so articles/posts can be put in the glovebox from the landing page? It seems you have to open an article before you can save it. Would be great to scan the posts in the morning, save those you want to read and go back later.
Hello Jason
One suggestion: When I go to “Clean out Glovebox” it deletes all of the content, can there be an option where I can choose which articles to delete? That way i can delete the articles that I have read and still keep the ones that I have not got around to reading yet.
My first thought exactly.
I am confident that they will make the changes accordingly.
I haven’t fiddled with it yet, but if this is the case a checkbox system with “select all” or “select none” additionally would be welcome! That way we have more control over what we clean out.
Finally, a place to store all the posts where you put eyeballs on trains.
This is actually a great idea. Sometimes I will scan the front page and not have a chance to read everything I want to, and then I forget to come back to it. Glovebox to store those, as well as favorites, is pretty helpful.
I’d stash the entirety of Adrian’s oeuvre for later consumption, and to bump his page views, which will net him a raise.
If this is anything like my real gloveboxeses, I’m gonna keep jamming random paperwork and restaurant napkins into it until it fails to latch.
The glovebox in my car is actually my wife’s domain. I don’t know everything she has in there, but every once in a while I have to get into it and shift things around to silence a rattle. Items I’ve noticed:
hair brush
4 pairs of sunglasses
broken tire gauge (I swear it was fine when I put it there)
a variety of hair accessories
2 travel size containers of aspirin/ibuprofen
Original paperwork for the car from the stealership (since 2019, mostly still sealed)
1 broken flip-flop (?!?)
I don’t know how it all fits, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s bigger on the inside.
Your car is secretly the Tardis.
I am disappointed in you Jason,where is the glovebox latch? All this ridicule of soft-button operated glove boxes and you can’t even be bothered to do it properly yourself.
I gloveboxed this article because part of my zero-inbox neurosis includes keeping as few redundant tabs open on my phone browser as possible. I have Autopian set as my upper-right tab. When I clicked this article, it opened in a new tab, so I gloveboxed it, closed the offending tab, and returned to the correct Autabian to continue my perusal.
I swear, it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
If this glovebox is anything like mine things will dissappear because the disrupter i keep in it goes off every time I hit a bump because I decided a disrupter with a hair trigger was a good idea but then just threw it in the glove box because I was tired of regrowing legs when the damn thing would go off every time I stepped wrong.
Holy run on sentence Batman!
Some kind of handy container…like a dashboard-mounted Pocket, where we might put an article to Read It Later. Amazing that nobody else has thought of this idea before! I mean, if they did, they definitely wouldn’t have discontinued it for no reason.
If parallels to Mozilla-abandoned projects continue, we might see a synonym for “Servo” next. Personally, I’m most looking forward to David Tracy’s version of “Rust”.